The present invention relates to towel dispensers of the type commonly used in public restrooms that employ a roll of toweling in which the toweling is withdrawn from a supply roll in a cabinet and forms a dependent loop accessible to the user drying his or her hands. The toweling is dispensed from the cabinet in successive portions in response to a pulling action by the user and the toweling is likewise continually taken up into the cabinet. The use of such dispensers in public restrooms is quite common and efforts to improve the working mechanisms employed therein are ongoing. Examples of such mechanisms are found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,579,398 and 4,999,611. In these devices as in most other hand drying devices in which a towel is dispensed from a roll, the toweling is formed of cloth. As a result, the cloth roll is sufficiently expensive that it is not generally economically feasible to simply discard the soiled roll. As a result, when the entire length of the roll has been used, it must be collected from the apparatus, cleaned and re-rolled and a new, fresh roll of cloth installed in the dispensing apparatus. The cost of maintaining such towel dispensing devices could be significantly reduced if disposable paper rolls could be employed in lieu of the cloth rolls. Efforts to substitute paper rolls for cloth rolls, however, have heretofore proved unsuccessful due to the inability of the cloth take-up mechanisms employed in such dispensing devices to properly handle rolls of paper. It has been found that far better control of a paper roll is required in such a dispensing mechanism than is required with conventional cloth rolls. While some twisting and lateral movement of the roll of toweling can be accommodated with such mechanisms when the toweling is formed of cloth, such movement cannot be accommodated using paper rolls. The device will jam. Also, if the mechanism employed to more precisely handle a paper roll is appreciably more expensive than those employed with cloth roll dispensers, the economic advantages of using a paper roll are lost. It would be highly desirable to provide a towel roll dispenser which can accommodate disposable paper towel rolls in which the handling mechanism is not appreciably more costly than that employed with paper rolls. It would also be highly desirable if existing cloth roll dispensers could be easily and economically modified so as to be able to handle disposable rolls of paper as opposed to cloth. The present invention achieves both these results.
It is therefore the principal object of the present invention to provide a towel dispenser of the type employing a roll of toweling in which the toweling is withdrawn from a supply roll in a cabinet and forms a dependent loop accessible to the user drying his or her hands wherein the toweling is formed of paper.
It is another object of the present invention to provide such a towel dispenser that is of simple construction and economical to manufacture.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a mechanism for converting a towel dispenser of the type employing a roll of cloth toweling in which the toweling is withdrawn from a supply roll in a cabinet and forms a dependent loop accessible to the user to dry his or her hands into a dispensing apparatus capable of handling a roll of paper toweling.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide such a mechanism that is of simple construction and economical to manufacture and install.